The browser itself continued working fine. Are you aware of any life-depending extension? Leaving this particular issue aside, your hypothetical "browser extension for people in the middle of the ocean" was doomed from its inception if it was designed to run as a browser extension (though it opens the door for an interesting discussion about similar scenarios that are happenning, like pilots relying on ipads)
> your hypothetical "browser extension for people in the middle of the ocean" was doomed from its inception if it was designed to run as a browser extension
Why? You haven't backed up that statement at all. Especially before they killed XUL it was easy to make a non-doomed app that runs as a browser extension, and it's still plenty possible.
No (non-demo) program should brick itself if it can't connect home.
There are _many_ applications that exist as browser extensions, including critical communications applications.
I don't personally know of any obviously life critical application done this way, mostly because I try to stay as far away from that sort of insanity.
If you don't think it's at least a plausible thing that could eventually happen you haven't been paying attention.
I personally got stuck stranded because of signals stupid built in timebombing when I was relying on a device with no untrusted third party ability to shove silent software updates for communication.
